Interesting study about the reason some people are immovable religious fundamentalists.

Study or not, I’d hesitate to call religious fanatics brain damaged. Misguided, maybe, and certainly dangerous. In fact, fanatics of any kind - except Gator fans - make life miserable for the vast majority of us.

 

I understand that, and I’m sure that’s what that limited study meant. But in common parlance, brain damaged is a slur. That’s why I’d hesitate before using that word even though I despise and fear fundamentalists. There are many factors leading one to the narrow world of fundamentalism, the chief being the environment in which one is raised.

 

Yeah I'd be more likely to think of liberals as brain damaged.

 

I figured brain damage when I saw the title

 

Don't think I ascribe to brain damage, which seems a bit pejorative. But I love this quote from a favorite theologian

Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.
Reinhold Neibuhr

 

Although its not on point, as this seems to focus more on people with brain damage being mentally inflexible, I always assumed that people attracted to fundamentalism were not smart people and were basically just attracted to the simplest answers. Not far off from the "build the wall" cult, really.

 

I tried my best when I was younger.

 

More accurately descriptive of unquestioning followers of the former president than of liberals although I think the correct description of ideologues on both sides of the political spectrum would be easily influenced individuals who either have lost the ability to think critically of choose not to do so.

 

Some, and just some, I have known are reformed degenerates, drunkards, wastrels, and reprobates who scared themselves and overcorrected into the straighter than straight and narrower than narrow. Coping mechanism

 

Mentally challenged. Don't know a one word term. Maybe debrained.

 

The jokes on you. I didn't even read the study. But then again you are pretty set on your opinions. You make statements like that all the time based on what you think you know.

 

I've encountered a good many Christian fundamentalists in the past 40 years and only a couple were clinically brain damaged. I don't know if their injuries preceded their conversion to Christian fundamentalism. What they all have in common is a rigidity in their faith to the point of brittleness. One on this forum, who believes the Bible to be literally true, once told me it would destroy him if he were to learn what he believes about the Bible was in fact not literally true.

Many, perhaps most, fundamentalists are unable to discern or even willing to consider that much of what they believe to be literally true could be metaphorical. For them it must all be true, or none of it is true, and go into protectionist mode to protect their beliefs rather than consider the alternative.